Creating and Painting an Ancient Artifact

In this Instructable, I will be teaching you how to take any object and paint it to look like an ancient artifact. In this example, I used a 3D printed skull that I created and placed (download for FREE) on Thingiverse. If you don't have access to a 3D printer, any clean and dry object should work nicely.

Step 1: Prepare Artifact

If you have a 3D printer, you can download the skull used in this Instructable here: https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-fancy-skull-2-free-low-res-100195
1. Any size works well. I recommend an infill of 4+ and 2+ shells/walls.
If you don't have a 3D printer, the instructions in this tutorial should work with any item you can spray paint.
Make sure your artifact is clean and dry

Step 2: Prime

Using a primer specific to your material (in this instance, I’m using a primer designed for plastic) spray the entire object, making sure rotate the object after each application (but allowing 20-30 minutes for each application to dry). Be sure to get all those spots deep within the artifact! We will need to paint them as well!

Step 3: Base Coat

We will be using three acrylic colors to paint the artifact. I've used typical craft acrylic paints, Army Painter paint and Warhammer paints. Any of them will do nicely.

Pick three colors, one very dark, one very bright and one in the middle.

The Base Coat uses the ‘Goldylocks’ color – not the darkest color, nor the lightest color. The one that’s just right… in the middle.

Step 4: Shading

After the base coat is completely dry, take your darkest color, and delude it with some water till it's soppy wet, then drip it, slap it, and smear it on. It should drip and settle in all those nice deep spots.

Step 5: Highlighting

Make sure your shading coat is bone dry (*HA!) then apply the lightest color to your brush, and brush most of it off on a napkin or paper towel then lightly brush the color on the very top edge of all the fun shapes on your artifact.